Watch: ‘Storm in a Bath Tub' made waves at Cork Midsummer Festival
Large crowds gathered in Cork city's Emmet Place over the weekend for Storm in a Bath Tub, which featured more than 120 performers as part of this year's Cork Midsummer Festival. The open-air show blended circus, theatre and live music.
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Irish Examiner
5 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
Theatre review: Escaped Alone questions our assumptions about older women
Escaped Alone, Everyman, Cork Midsummer Festival, ★★★★☆ Escaped Alone is a short, sharp shock of a play from British playwright Caryl Churchill, one of the finest dramatists at work today. There is also a wealth of female talent deployed, both on stage and off, in this Irish premiere, staged by Hatch Theatre Company and the Everyman Theatre, in association with Once Off Productions, as part of Cork Midsummer Festival. Three older women — Sally (Sorcha Cusack), Vi (Ruth McCabe), and Lena (Deirdre Monaghan)— sit companionably in a garden setting but the signifiers are queasily hyperreal in their foreshadowing — the grass is plastic, the tree appears to wither as the action progresses and the sun burns with an intense fury. They are joined by Mrs Jarrett (Anna Healy) who wanders in from the side aisle of the theatre, already marked as an outsider. Ruth McCabe, Sorcha Cusack, Deirdre Monaghan, and Anna Healy in a scene from Escaped Alone. Picture: Ros Kavanagh Initially, the women chat about the topics that lubricate our everyday social interactions — relatives, TV shows, shopping — but their dry and often funny observations, paired with successive interior monologues, are anything but anodyne. They talk over and interrupt each other but beneath the passive aggressive swipes there is also love, connection and the bonding of a shared past. Mrs Jarrett — an unlikely Cassandra dressed in leggings, hoodie, socks and sandals — breaks off intermittently to deliver a litany of apocalyptic scenarios which, unfortunately, are not that dystopian. For a play that was first performed almost a decade ago, these have a startling immediacy, and a deadpan Healy leans into the comic bleakness of it all, making the audience, in its laughter, complicit in the looming catastrophe. Anna Healy in Escaped Alone. Picture: Ros Kavanagh Churchill, thankfully, is not out to impart any lessons in her work; there are no easy epiphanies here. But she does lead us to question our assumptions — especially the ones we make about older women whose interior lives, now more than ever, usually hold no interest in a world where appearance counts for everything. Annabelle Comyn's direction is assured and while the individual performances are excellent, the cast doesn't quite seem to gel as a whole, which may in part be down to the elliptical script and dialogue. As Mrs Jarrett says thanks for the tea and heads home, the buzz of animated discussion afterwards shows the power of work that nudges audiences out of their comfort zone, where some of the best theatre resides. Escaped Alone is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, June 19-28
Irish Examiner
13 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
Watch: ‘Storm in a Bath Tub' made waves at Cork Midsummer Festival
Large crowds gathered in Cork city's Emmet Place over the weekend for Storm in a Bath Tub, which featured more than 120 performers as part of this year's Cork Midsummer Festival. The open-air show blended circus, theatre and live music.
Irish Times
16 hours ago
- Irish Times
The Second Woman review: Eileen Walsh's 24-hour performance reveals something astonishing about us
The Second Woman Cork Opera House ★★★★★ I go into Cork Opera House to see The Second Woman braced for a punishing experience. The premise is that Eileen Walsh performs the same break-up scene on a loop for 24 hours, with 100 different men, mostly nonactors selected through a public call-out. They've read the script but haven't rehearsed it. This might suggest the play is trying to say that our entrapment in gendered roles protects us from the frightening – and potentially redemptive – experience of real intimacy. That we cast others in tired romantic scripts, re-enacting familiar patterns that obscure our ability to truly see one another. Fear of love disguised as its performance. [ Eileen Walsh: Women actors 'are like avocados. You're nearly ready, nearly ready - then you're ripe, then you've gone off' Opens in new window ] Or perhaps it's making a broader point, not just about gender but about the compulsions of private suffering: how we return, again and again, to the primal scene of our own hurt, condemned to repeat it without ever resolving or transcending it. In short, I expect something boring and depressing. Endurance theatre may be admirable, but it's rarely much fun. READ MORE Happily, I am wrong. To begin with, The Second Woman, which is being staged as part of Cork Midsummer Festival , is incredibly stylish. Onstage is a glowing pink box with gauze walls, inside which sits a brightly lit livingroom with a neon sign and vintage wooden furniture. Walsh enters pushing a trolley of whiskey bottles and glasses. She's in a red dress and strappy heels, her hair platinum-blond and voluminous in a very Hollywood way. The whole aesthetic nods to John Cassavetes ' Opening Night – the source of the script – but also evokes films such as Paris, Texas and Mulholland Drive. More than any one film, though, it recalls the voyeurism of early reality dating shows such as Love Connection, where private loves and humiliations were first made public. A camera crew circles the gauze box, filming close-ups projected live on to a large screen, amplifying the cinematic, self-aware atmosphere. The Second Woman: Eileen Walsh during her 24-hour theatrical marathon. Photograph: Jed Niezgoda The Second Woman: Eileen Walsh during her 24-hour theatrical marathon. Photograph: Jed Niezgoda The Second Woman: Eileen Walsh during her 24-hour theatrical marathon. Photograph: Jed Niezgoda The structure of the piece, which is directed by its creators, Nat Randall and Anna Breckon, is simple: Walsh waits while melancholic piano music plays. A man arrives with takeaway. They share noodles, a drink, a song, a dance, and break up. He leaves, saying either 'I love you' or 'I never loved you.' The piano starts again. The scene resets. Far from being a bleak comment on the replaceability of romantic partners, what emerges is the astonishing range of human difference. The fixed script throws each man's interpretation into relief. Some play it angry, others earnest. The funniest ones go meta: 'Are we really doing this again?' Some guys are so sexy: tender and knowing and playful. Some guys are just assholes, spilling their noodles. Such is life. What truly shines is Walsh's intelligence, responsiveness and flexibility. She's up for anything, alive to each variation. She can switch from mischief to abjection in a blink. Repetition, counterintuitively, deepens. Attend to anything closely enough and it opens like a flower to the light. As John Cage said, 'If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If it's still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.'
